About Me

Tech-curious movie addict who will work for (very) good coffee. Owns imaginary pug Steve and Pembroke Welsh corgi French Fry. A born foodie who watches too much TV and a Doctor Who fan. Gets a fix from putting together Ikea furniture but doesn’t shop there. Pays bills by moonlighting as a public relations consultant. Hopes to grow up to become a movie critic, chef extraordinaire, travel writer, yoga practitioner – in no specific order.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Disgruntled workers are dangerous

Honestly. It's true - why do you think Google treats their employees so well? Why do you think every MNC out there is constantly shouting about how well they're treating their employees - note that I said shouting about it, it's not like they're doing much. A 15-day leave plan compared to the usual 14 honestly isn't anything to shout about, neither is a nursing room, or a pseudo flexi-hour work plan (employees choose to come in either at 8:00am, 8:30am or 9:00am and leave 30 mins later or earlier depending on what time they come in - how in the world is that flexi?).

So what's my point? Today - I feel like one. One semi-disgruntled worker. Why? I had my plans ruined. I was down with a stomach virus on Wednesday, had my Thursday (Deepavali public holiday) to recover and was ready and raring to go out on Friday for some much needed retail therapy and run my usual errands. Granted that I had to wake up at 9:00am this morning to do conference call with the Box.net dudes in Sunnyvale (did I mention I was supposed to be on leave today?) -- decided that I would go back to bed after.

Little did I know, trouble was already brewing to completely ruin my plans for the day. My phone was ringing off the hook (I'm using the Sony Ericsson P1i by the way - giving it a second chance and the speakers on the phone are astounding. Amazing sound considering that it's not from the Walkman portfolio) around noon and after dragging myself out of bed, I found out that one of my clients just dropped a bomb.

Sidetrack: My apartment now smells like an Indian wedding. No thanks to my very noisy Indian neighbors downstairs who are obviously celebrating Deepavali -- fireworks and briyani I can stand, but not the intoxicating smell of flowers like jasmine. Desperately trying to get rid of the smell - windows closed, satsuma on burner.

So instead of going off to get my brows and hair done, and avoiding the crazy weekend crowds at the malls and maybe catching Lars and the Real Girl -- I was stuck sitting in front of my computer for the past 4.5 hours working on a PowerPoint deck. Happy, happy, joy, joy - not. You know what annoyed me the most? The fact that I was rushing at the end coz I knew deadline was approaching but my phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing - even after I told the person on the other line to give me 15 more minutes. I'm no where near a technophobe - but I HATE phones. Honestly, I think phones are a complete invasion of privacy. If you need to reach me - email me, MSN/Yahoo me, text message me or even send me a message on Facebook but unless it's a matter of life and death - don't call me. I'm all for in-person/face-to-face communication but when people get too dial-happy, it annoys the fuck out of me.

And to top it off, Citrix is driving me up the wall because it keeps disconnecting me from the network when I'm working at home. And guess what? It only does that on my Mac! Asses. It's all a conspiracy I tell you. It's just a matter of time before I absolutely refuse to use MS Office on my Mac and switch over to iWork. Also need to find the time to convince Ben to help me port my work PC into a VM to run on Fusion on my Mac. Hmm...Ooo, speaking of Macs...

Thanks to Ben, I now have Leopard running on my MacBook! YAY! I love Spaces - who needs dual screens when you have Spaces! Wooooo... and not to mention the new Cover Flow function for browsing documents and Quick Look which lets you preview files (all docs and videos!) and seriously, I don't know how they do it - but Spotlight is the best search function on any computer. Oh wait, you can't use Spotlight on PCs - nah nah nah.

Ok - off to grab a bite, craving for cupcakes but will have to settle for some tiramisu Haagen Dazs and german sausage. Check out the guided Leopard tour if you're bored - be prepared to be amazed. I was blown away the first time I saw it.